Chapter 14
That Friday evening as promised, Elisavet turned up right on time. Her dark hair was loose, and she was wearing a blue T-shirt and jeans as if it was her night off.
Cora took her through to the front room and handed her the black leather notebook which was still warm because she’d been pressing it against her heart like a Bible. The mended china boy was on the mantelpiece, next to the lump of clay.
She lit a large church candle in the hearth as it was too warm to make a fire. ‘Come and sit here,’ she gestured, because it seemed only right that Elisavet should sit in Frank’s chair to speak his words.
She went to the kitchen and poured a glass of wine and put it on the little mahogany table next to Elisavet because the occasion seemed to call for it.
She did it very carefully and respectfully, like a ritual, wanting everything to be done properly.
There! And then she settled down in the chair opposite to listen.
Elisavet opened the notebook and began to translate.
November 1944
‘Hands up! Schnell!’
I was face to face with the enemy, standing in the rot and decay of the ditch, paralysed by terror, facing interrogation, torture and death by a British bullet.
I wanted to raise my hands in surrender but adrenaline had petrified me. I couldn’t move them and they hung down uselessly like lead at my sides.
‘Move! Schnell!’
The voice was fading now, and I woke with a jerk to find my heavy hands were up after all, my fingers caught tightly in the luggage rack webbing over my head, and I was not in the ditch, nor crushed in a cattle truck with fifty other men, but alone in a comfortable railway carriage in enemy country.
Weary men were streaming by along the platform.
So here we are, we have reached our destination, wherever here is, impossible to tell because the station signs are painted over.
I took my bag down from the luggage rack and as I did so I noticed the small, printed sign fixed beneath it: Great Western Railway.
To my surprise the map detailed all the road and rail links along the route, a map that had obviously been overlooked by those in authority who should have known better – lucky for me!
I took out my fountain pen and copied the map on the inside of my cap as meticulously as I could, a wavering line of coast on which I wrote the words: Newport Cardiff Bridgend Port Talbot Neath – the word ‘port’ had me buzzing. What good fortune! Port equalled freedom!
I smoothed my hair into place, adjusted the worn grey field cap on my head, opened the door into the corridor and joined the men stepping down onto the platform into this chilly November day.
Milling around in the station, hundreds of defeated men shuffled from foot to foot to keep warm. The lucky ones. An old man told me so in Calais before we were divided into groups, separated from our close comrades indiscriminately.
‘Lucky? How do you make that out?’ I asked him, genuinely wanting to know.
‘You’re a good-looking chap, life will be kind to you,’ the old man said cheerfully. ‘And more importantly – we’re alive, aren’t we?’
Barely, in his case, I thought now. The optimistic man was skin and bone, scooped up by Hitler to make up numbers in our depleted ranks.
I licked my dry lips, thinking of the biscuit and the cup of tea that the guards had handed out when we got on the train. I’d let the biscuit dissolve blissfully on my tongue, making it last.
On the station platform we were all thrown together, the German Army, Kriegsmarine, Waffen SS and Luftwaffe, the SS claiming superiority, and all getting frustrated because further up the platform there was some kind of a commotion going on.
The Nazi officers were refusing to carry their own kit bags because it was beneath their dignity to take orders from a Britisher of a lower rank like common soldiers.
A year ago, I would have approved of this approach.
Rules were rules! Now, I looked around warily, trying to gauge the reaction of those around me and wishing we could just get on with it.
I caught the eye of a young lad in a filthy uniform.
The lad was crying silently and his tears were leaving clean tracks down his cheeks to his jaw.
Young, but not too young to fight, just as the lucky old man was not too old.
All welcome! Roll up! Roll up!
‘They’re going to shoot us,’ the lad said fearfully, gasping out the words between sobs.
Which is exactly what I was thinking myself, because that’s one sure thing we knew about the British: they interrogated you and then they shot you.
But so far I hadn’t seen any prisoners shot although I was initially suspicious that the tea and biscuits were to be our Last Supper. ‘No, they won’t,’ I reassured the kid. ‘Geneva Convention.’
Suddenly a bad-tempered, self-important official in a dark uniform with gold braid burst out of the ticket office in a state of fury. In a strange accent, he ordered us to vacate his railway station at once.
The Nazi officers saluted him, satisfied that their request for a superior officer had been granted. They followed his orders to leave the station immediately and we started moving at last.
Lining the road ahead of us I could see the local civilians silently watching from the kerbside.
Their silence unnerved me. It was worse than the obscenities of the French and the spit of the Belgians. These people were not angry, but disappointed.
Me too, I thought.
I had started to wonder if the whole mess of war had been wasteful and pointless, but I goose-stepped along anyway because that was what I’d been trained to do, and as I marched I glanced at the faces in the crowd.
The silence was broken by a strange man shouting hoarsely: ‘Love thine enemy!’ Behind us in the station the guard whistled and the steam hissed and the train began chugging noisily along the railway track, and I remembered the map I’d copied into my cap.
It was such a wonderful stroke of luck, my one bit of good fortune in the darkness of chaos, that I smiled to myself.
A young woman on the pavement responded by smiling back at me. She was an unusual woman, with vivid green hair and a bright yellow face, but her smile was sweet and sympathetic.
BANG!
The blow landed hard and unexpected on the back of my head, like being hit by a stick. It knocked my cap off. My map! The stick was in fact the bony arm of a furious, middle-aged woman, yelling at me: ‘Murderer!’
I stumbled, trying to retrieve the cap and the men behind me laughed grimly and marched into me, shoving me forward because everyone liked a bit of sport, a bit of fun at someone else’s expense.
My unexpected hope for the future, my means of escape had gone, it had gone just like that. ‘Hey you! Keep up, will you,’ a British guard encouraged me, with no particular ferocity.
The wild man in the sandwich board was still shouting: ‘Love thine enemy!’
The SS officers at the front started singing patriotically, drowning him out, and the rest of us took it up: ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’.
I too belted it out tunelessly, and the crowd was a wary audience for fifteen hundred stubborn, defiant voices as we marched to our new home in Island Farm, POW Camp 198.
Here, Elisavet stopped reading and closed Frank’s black notebook. She placed it carefully on the mahogany table next to her now empty wineglass and looked up at Cora.
Don’t stop! Cora wanted to urge her, because for the past hour or so she’d been full of the thrill of Frank’s story and lively and young again. But remembering she was mature and sensible, she smiled gratefully.
‘Thank you, Elisavet. Lovely!’ She rapped her chest with her knuckles, mimicking the thud of her heart.
The candle flickered on the hearth. ‘Took me back, it did.’ She smiled, because she felt so at home in the past she didn’t want to leave it.
‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked hopefully. ‘More wine?’
‘No, no,’ Elisavet said, shaking her head. Her dark hair slinked around her shoulders. She got to her feet. ‘I can translate more the next time if you like.’
‘Oh, can you? Great, thank you, that would be—’ Cora felt tears of gratitude rush hot and unexpected in her eyes, and she blinked them away. ‘I’d like that,’ she nodded, and she followed Elisavet to the door.
She watched her go down the path and when she was out of sight Cora stayed in the doorway listening to the night noises with a sense of dislocation. She frowned, wondering what was different. Then she realised that it was the sound of peaceful quiet.
Silence is a luxury, she thought. The war had been full of constant noise, from one source or another.
Funny how the past held on to its place in a lifespan like a museum of the memory, always open to be revisited and reviewed.
She closed the door.
And relived, she thought.